In South Korea, nearly 40% of the elderly population lives in poverty, one of the highest rates in the developed world. As the country undergoes a rapid demographic transition and the share of older individuals increases, understanding the drivers of old-age poverty becomes increasingly...

New Zealand's population is ageing. Public spending on public pensions (NZ Superannuation) and health are particularly sensitive to this trend and are expected to increase accordingly. Current and future government policies aimed at addressing this challenge will not only influence macroeconomic...

In einem Impulspapier weist der wissenschaftliche Beraterkreis des Bundeswirtschaftsministeriums auf die Notwendigkeit entschlossener Reformen des Rentensystems hin, damit die Rente finanzierbar bleibt. Die Reformvorschläge reichen von der Kopplung des Renteneintrittsalters an die fernere...

Default settings strongly increase pension enrollment, especially when savings incentives are high and choices are complex. We show that the effect is weaker when incentives are low, options are simple, and opting out is easy. We study the nationwide introduction of auto-enrollment for...

Mit dem Rentenmodell DyReMo werden verschiedene Varianten der künftigen Entwicklung der gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung sowie Reformen simuliert und die Folgen für Beitragssatz, Sicherungsniveau, Zahlungen aus dem Bundeshaushalt und implizite Renditen analysiert. Dabei werden eine veränderte...

Default settings strongly increase pension enrollment, especially when savings incentives are high and choices are complex. We show that the effect is weaker when incentives are low, options are simple, and opting out is easy. We study the nationwide introduction of auto-enrollment for low...

Non-take-up of social benefits occurs when eligible individuals or households fail to claim welfare support to which they are entitled. This paper provides new estimates of take-up for major UK benefits between 2008 and 2023, including Child Benefit, Pension Credit, and Universal Credit together...

This paper examines the causal impact of retirement on social capital using nationally representative Australian panel data. Exploiting the eligibility age for the Age Pension, we find that retirement significantly enhances social capital by increasing social connectedness and community...

Reliable statistics on the distribution of wealth - and how this has changed over time - are essential for informing a range of policy debates. Unfortunately, current official statistics from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) do not provide a coherent or consistent guide to how wealth is...

This paper examines how policy uncertainty influences retirement decisions. We develop a simple model in which individuals face a one-time choice between immediate retirement and continued employment until the statutory retirement age. In the absence of policy uncertainty, retirement decisions...

The literature on growth dependencies increasingly calls for post-growth welfare states capable of functioning without reliance on GDP growth in order to remain within planetary limits. Yet empirical research on the relationship between welfare state arrangements and economic growth remains...

Despite automatic enrolment in work pension schemes, private saving for pensions in the UK is relatively low, with most people under-pensioned in later life and reliant on the state pension. In this book, Hayley James shows that equally significant is that women save far less for old age than...

The public social insurance system in Egypt plays a critical role in maintaining the cohesion of society within the country’s broader social protection framework. The system has a long history that dates back to the mid-19th century and includes various laws that have been introduced over time...

We study how pension systems shape labor supply at older ages using census microdata from 78 countries. Male employment rates are similar in midlife across countries but diverge sharply thereafter: by age 75, 54% of men remain employed in low-income countries compared with 8% in high-income...

As the European population ages, the sustainability of pension systems faces a trilemma: the structural conflict between achieving benefit adequacy, fiscal stability, and labor market flexibility. This study investigates the primary research hypothesis that these three objectives involve...

Within the three-pillar German pension system, the German Pension Insurance remains the most important source of old-age income. From a gender comparative perspective, existing literature shows the inequality between men and women regarding income and wealth in general. Wealth includes pension...

This study investigates the motherhood penalty on personal net wealth and public pension wealth, focusing on women born between 1937 and 1989. Expanding upon previous research, we (a) contrast the impact of motherhood on public pension wealth and net wealth, (b) adopt a dynamic perspective by...

We study heterogeneity in the effects of a pension reform in Germany: the introduction of the old-age pension for the very long-term insured, which lowered the threshold for full pension receipt from age 65 to 63. Using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) and rich administrative pension...

Using Danish register data, we study whether individuals save enough to maintain almost all (90%) of their pre-retirement consumption. We find that 85 percent do, largely due to mandatory labour market pension contributions. The remaining 15 percent are less likely to have mandatory pension...

Many countries have implemented a variety of pension reforms in response to the challenges posed by an aging population. These reforms typically involve a trade-off between 'refinancing' (i.e., increasing contributions) and 'retrenchment' (i.e., reducing benefits). The primary question addressed...

In this paper, we use an overlapping-generations standard-incomplete markets model to quantitatively investigate the long-run implications of Korea's demographic changes and policy reforms. Importantly, our quantitative model endogenizes the retirement decision and matches the elasticity of...

When the Social Security retirement Trust Fund is exhausted in 2032, old-age and survivor benefits in total must be cut by 24 percent, according to current projections. This is generally thought to be an across-the-board cut by the Social Security Administration, which would hit the poor...

This study examines the effectiveness of the Zanzibar Universal Pension Scheme using the Zanzibar taxbenefit microsimulation model ZANMOD and data from the 2019/2020 Household Budget Survey across baseline, historical, and reform scenarios. It shows that the scheme plays an important role in...

The Social Security "full retirement age" (FRA) is the age at which retirement income benefits are available without reduction for early commencement. Presently, that age is 67 for those born in 1960 or later. This paper is about the unfair and unnecessary threat to reduce Social Security...

This report is one of two reports on the management of pension wealth in retirement conducted as part of the Pensions Review, led by the Institute for Fiscal Studies in partnership with the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust. In this report, we examine the decisions that older individuals face as...

The current system of private pension savings in the UK is based on employers choosing a workplace pension provider, to which contributions from the employee and employer are sent, and which invests the contributions on behalf of the employee. This means that when an individual leaves their...

This report examines ethnic differences in pension participation in the UK following the nationwide roll-out of automatic enrolment, the drivers of those gaps, and the consequences for wealth accumulation. It draws on an academic research paper (Cribb, O'Brien and Sturrock, 2025) published...

This paper examines reform measures for the National Pension System, analyzing their fiscal impacts. Despite past reforms adjusting contribution and replacement rates, the system faces ongoing sustainability challenges. We forecast that the reserve fund, peaking at 1,972.0 trillion KRW in 2039,...

This study conducts a financial projection of the basic pension in Korea, which provides cash assistance to the bottom 70% of elderly individuals aged 65 and over. The projection is carried out under both expansion and selective eligibility criteria, with particular emphasis on the latter....

The gender pension gap, the difference in pension entitlements between men and women, is 32 percent for 60-yearolds according to data from the German Pension Insurance (Deutsche Rentenversicherung). In addition, there is a considerable motherhood pension gap: Statutory pension entitlements for...

Im österreichischen Pensionsrecht ermöglicht eine durchgängige Erwerbskarriere eine Pensionshöhe von 80% des durchschnittlichen Erwerbseinkommens. In dieser Studie wird die Auswirkung einer allgemeinen zusätzlichen betrieblichen Altersvorsorge auf die Höhe der Erstpension untersucht. Eine...

Our paper examines the financial preparedness of near-retirement individuals across five countries: the United States, Japan, and the Republic of Korea (developed economies) and the People's Republic of China and India (developing economies). It focuses on four channels of retirement support:...

In this paper, I investigate how individuals perceive the implicit contribution incentives provided by public pension systems. I use the unique setting of the Spanish public pension system, where self-employed workers are allowed to voluntarily determine the level of their Social Security...

The prevalence and determinants of intimate partner violence (IPV) among older women are severely understudied. This paper documents that the incidence of IPV remains high at old ages and provides the first evidence of the impact of access to income on IPV for older women. We leverage a Mexican...